Gaza hospital says 37 dead in Israeli strike on UN school

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RAFAH – A Gaza hospital said at least 37 people were killed in an Israeli strike on a UN-run school on Thursday, that the Israeli military alleged housed a “Hamas compound”.
The raid came after US, Qatari and Egyptian mediators resumed talks aimed at securing a truce and hostage-prisoner swap in the eight-month war triggered by Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel.
The Israeli military said it had “eliminated” several militants in a “precise strike on a Hamas compound embedded inside a UNRWA school” in the Nuseirat area of central Gaza.
Military spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari later said nine “terrorists” were killed when fighter jets attacked three classrooms where about 30 militants from Islamic Jihad and Hamas were hiding.
The United States has called on Israel to be “fully” transparent about the strike.
“The government of Israel has said that they are going to release more information about this strike, including the names of those who died in it. We expect them to be fully transparent in making that information public,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters.
UN chief Antonio Guterres called the strike “just another horrific example of the price that civilians are paying”.
“There will need to be accountability for everything that has happened in Gaza,” his spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell called for the strike to be “independently investigated”.
Israel accuses Hamas and its allies in Gaza of using schools, hospitals and other civilian infrastructure including facilities run by UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, as operational centres — charges the militants deny.
The Al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital in Deir al-Balah, near Nuseirat, said it had received the bodies of at least “37 martyrs” from the strike.
Faisal Thari, a displaced Gazan who had sought refuge at the school, told AFP: “Why? What have we done for them to bomb us?”
Hamas in a statement decried a “new crime… against our people”.
A medic said another Israeli pre-dawn strike killed six people in a house in Nuseirat refugee camp, and witnesses reported intense shelling in the Bureij and Al-Maghazi camps in the same area.
Israeli warplanes also carried out strikes in parts of Rafah, a source in Gaza’s southernmost city told AFP.